The standard system of music notation is an indirect system to represent music notes. It needs tremendous efforts to describe music. First of all, it uses an upper (or treble) clef and a lower (or bass) clef. Each clef has five parallel horizontal lines (called staff). Each line and intervening space represents a specific note's name on the A-G scale. So in order to know the note's name, students have to remember its position on the staff and type of clef, treble clef or bass clef. If a note does not locate inside the staff, then supplemental spaced lines must be added above or below the staff (called ledger lines). Students then can determine the note's name with reference to the number of added lines.
That is just for determining the note's name. How to determine the note's duration (the length of a note)? A bunch of oval note symbols are used for that. For example, an unshaded oval note alone denotes a whole note. If a whole note has a vertical stem line attached with it, then it becomes a half-note. If a half-note is solidly shaded, then it becomes a quarter-note. Notes of shorter than duration of a quarter-note are indicated as for quarter-notes, but with one or more angled lines marked on the stem lines, with each angled lines indicating that the note length is to be half of what it would have been without the angled line. An eighth-note looks like a quarter-note with one angled line of the stem. A sixteenth-note looks like a quarter-note with two angled lines of the stem, and so on. But that is not all for determining duration of a note, the standard system of music notation uses a dot to the right of the note, indicating that the note is now to have a duration 50% greater than its original duration. For example, a quarter-note with a dot has duration equal to one-and-a-half quarter-notes.
The standard system of music notation has another convention relate to the duration of a note in complicated ways. That is tuplet. A tuplet is any rhythm that involves dividing the beat into a different number of equal subdivisions from that usually permitted by the time signature. The most common tuplet is the triplet. Whereas normally two quarter-notes are the same duration as a half-note, but three triple quarter notes total that same duration. So the duration of a triplet quarter note is ⅔ of a standard quarter note. Similarly, three triplet eighth notes are equal in duration to one quarter note. If several note values appear under the triple bracket, they are all affected the same way, reduced to ⅔ their original duration. The triple indication may also apply to notes of different values, for example a quarter note followed by one eighth note, in which case the quarter note may be regarded as two triplet eighths tied together. Beside triplets, the standard system of music notation also has duplets (2), quintuplets (5), sextuplets (6), septuplets (7), etc.
As preceding examples illustrate, the standard system of music notation is a complicated indirect system for determining note name and note duration, thus giving new students so many things to remember as they start to learn to read music. That makes a lot of new students feel learning music is difficult and they give it up very soon.
There is a need for a new music notation system that is easier to read and learn. In particular, there is a need for a music notation system that simpler and less abstract than the standard music notation system. In order to do that there is a need to eliminate its middle conventions such clef, staff, oval, ledger line, stem line, angled line, a dot, tuplet, etc. There is a yet further need for a music notation system that provides a direct visual representation of note's name and note's duration, thus eliminating the need to interpret note indication in accordance with non-institutive convention in order to know note's name and to determine how long the indicated note are to be held. The present invention is directed to these needs.